Sleeping With the Opposition (Bad Boy Bosses) (6 page)

Leo wasn’t good at emotion. His father had always said crying and carrying on never solved anything. So now he solved the problem or fought the problem, and if he couldn’t do either, then he shut his damn mouth and stayed out of the way so he didn’t make things worse.

How would baring his soul like a sniveling boy do anyone any good? If there were any other way…

He settled for trying to be normal, hoping that if he faked it long enough, she could find her way back to normal, too…and back to him.

He carried the popcorn bowl into the kitchen. He didn’t bother with the lights while he tidied up the dishes and put things away. His thoughts were elsewhere, and those thoughts were perfect to have in the shadows.

He tried to focus on the light at the end of the tunnel, because even though Bria’d dropped that bomb about separating and wanting him out of the house, he’d felt a huge wave of relief to see her coming back to life. When she’d quit her job at Ashton Granger Markham and gone after a partnership spot somewhere else, he’d done a silent cheer because she was fighting again. Fighting for
something
, even if she wasn’t fighting for
him
.

Leo left the kitchen and made his way up the stairs. He stopped at the top and looked down the hall toward the master bedroom. He wanted more than anything to be in there with her right this minute, but it was still too soon. She’d responded to him tonight, but she hadn’t wanted to, and he suspected she was already talking herself out of any feelings he’d managed to pull from her. If he pushed his luck, he would end up right back where he started.

Tomorrow was a new day, though. And tomorrow he would refine his strategy.

Chapter Five

Saturday, and it had been almost a week since dinner at Russo’s. Bria had adhered to the letter of their agreement. She’d thrown together a stir-fry Wednesday night and had it waiting when he got home, and there’d been chicken potpie on Friday night. But even though she had been present, the walls had gone back up—all the way up—and the essence of her was decidedly absent.

Reluctantly, he’d agreed to use their one weekend day today separating their belongings, so he’d gotten up early to go to the gym and stopped to get them coffee on the way back, but when he pulled into the driveway, her car was gone, and she hadn’t texted him or left him a note.

With a sigh, he put the coffee on the kitchen counter and went upstairs, stripping his shirt off on the way to the bathroom. He jumped in the shower, but it was only when he’d finished washing up that he realized there were no towels. Marissa came to clean on Fridays, so they’d all been washed and folded and put back in the linen closet.

Dripping and naked, he opened the bathroom door and ran right into Bria.

“Oh!” She put her hand flat against his chest before snatching it back as if his skin burned. He might have been offended, but her eyes widened, and her gaze drank him in like she couldn’t get enough. “What are you…? Shouldn’t you be…?”

He kind of enjoyed watching her squirm. He crossed his arms. “Good morning,” he said with a grin. Her face was flushed, but that might have been because she was dressed in her running outfit, hair pulled back in a bouncy ponytail.

“Oh God. Towel. Where’s your
towel
?” She finally dragged her gaze away and looked pointedly at the painting on the wall.

He stepped forward and grasped both of her forearms, startling her into looking up at him again. Her hands instinctively flew to his waist, and her touch on his skin, however brief, however light, sent a sharp electrical pulse to his already-awakening cock.

“Leo, wait. I don’t think—”

He gently nudged her aside before letting her go and opening up the door of the linen closet in her face.

She let out a chuckle. He tried not to care that it sounded more relieved than disappointed when he pulled out a towel, wrapped it around his waist, and tucked the end so it wouldn’t fall down.

“If you’re, ah…finished in there, I need to jump in the shower, too,” she said.

He frowned. “Why aren’t you using the en suite?”

She paused. “I noticed a few cracked tiles in the shower, so I don’t want to get it wet until I can have someone come and take a look at it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? That shouldn’t be hard to fix.”

He started forward to go check it out, but her hand shot up. She flattened her palm against his chest again, but this time she left it there to stop him. “No, Leo. I don’t need you to take care of it.” She took a deep breath. “I need to learn how to deal with these things on my own. I’ve already called a guy. He’ll be here on Monday.”

His body tensed. “This is still my house, too,” he said, jaw clenched. “And you don’t get to make those kinds of decisions without me.”

“Leo, it’s just a—”

“I’ll get dressed and take a look at it,” he continued stubbornly. “There’s coffee on the kitchen counter when you’re finished with your shower.”

After examining the shower in the master en suite and cataloging the supplies he would need to replace the cracked tiles, Leo turned to find Bria watching from the bathroom door. “Well?” she said.

“It’s not that big a deal. It’s definitely not worth taking a day off work to wait for someone to come in, and forking over a hundred and twenty bucks an hour. We have extra tiles in the basement. I can have it replaced this afternoon, and once it’s re-grouted, you can use the shower again in a day or two.”

She bit her lip. He could see the wheels turning in her brilliant head. She wanted her bathroom back as soon as possible, but she didn’t want
him
to do the work. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

He’d spent an entire summer helping Mr. Russo and Jason retile the kitchen at the restaurant the year he graduated high school. “I want it done right just as much as you do, Bria. I wouldn’t suggest it if I didn’t think I could do it properly.”

She nodded. “Okay, I’m sorry. So, what do we do?”

He swiped his hands on his jeans. “I’ll run to the hardware store and get what I need, then it’s just a matter of chiseling out the tiles and popping the new ones in.”

“I’ll get my coat. I’m coming with you.”

He shook his head. “There’s no need. You probably have work to do.”

“I want to learn,” she said stubbornly, crossing her arms. “Besides, I’m not giving you an extra weekend just because this one got sidetracked. You wanted to spend time doing things that normal married people do. Well, home repair falls under that category, right?”

“Are you sure? You’ve never even used a drill or a monkey wrench before.”

“I’m sure I can figure out how to do those things, too,” she said, determined to learn so that she wouldn’t need to ask for help from him, or anyone, ever again.

“I have no doubt that you can.” He grinned. “All right, but you might want to change your clothes. Home renovations are rarely tidy.”

She looked down at the tights and comfortable sweaterdress she’d slipped on after her shower and nodded. “I’ll meet you downstairs in five minutes.”

When he left the room, she let out a deep, shuddering breath, trying not to stare at his ass in those jeans before the door closed behind him. Last night when she’d finally fallen asleep, she’d dreamed of him. Of skin and sweat and moans and sighs. She’d dreamed of his lips melting away her regrets, his teeth and hands bringing her back to life and vanquishing her fears.

She’d gone running this morning to try to burn off the hunger she’d awakened with, the need that had been building with every evening she’d spent with Leo this week, so that she could stick to her guns when faced with the prospect of an entire day with him.

She changed into jeans and a T-shirt and met Leo downstairs. He handed her a cup of coffee. “I reheated it for you,” he said, taking a swig from his own cup.

She took a sip. It was perfect, but that was no surprise. He knew exactly how she liked her coffee. He also knew that she liked cinnamon on her pancakes and ketchup on her eggs. He knew she thought getting up before nine on weekends was akin to torture, that she was a sucker for online cat videos, and that she’d wanted to go to Hawaii ever since seeing
South Pacific
on television last year.

He knew her.

She knew him, too. She knew that he hated her pot roast but would never say a word, that after law school, he’d gotten job offers from the biggest firms across the country but had wanted to stay close to support his mother, so he’d done the unthinkable and started his own firm, busting his ass to make it a quick success. And she knew that Mr. Russo had taken him under his wing and shown him what it meant to be part of a big family, and he’d been desperate to have that for real ever since his mother died the year before they were married.

They took their coffees with them in the car. At the hardware store, she grabbed a cart because she wasn’t sure what they were going to need. Leo’s eyes lit up at the sight of all the aisles. Lumber. Plumbing. Electrical. Flooring. He seemed to find something in each department that made his grin wider. When they’d first moved into the house, most of the work had already been done by the previous owners, so this was a side of him she hadn’t seen before, and she bit back a surprised chuckle.

“What is it?” he asked, examining the cordless drills.

She shook her head. “I’m suddenly wondering why you became a lawyer, when this is obviously your calling.”

He laughed. “I seriously considered it, but when it was time to make the decision, I went to law school because arguing gave me the same release that boxing does…only on an intellectual level.”

She picked up a hammer from the rack and tested its weight. “They both certainly encourage your competitive side,” she said, thinking about their case and the aggressive settlement demand she’d gotten from him on Friday. “But I can see how the physical challenges of this kind of career would have made it a close second for you.”

Her gaze sought out the way his arms and pecs stretched the light cotton of his T-shirt, honed from years of working out and boxing. He may not have gone into construction work, but that certainly hadn’t kept him from seeking out physical challenges in addition to intellectual ones.

They filled the cart with supplies, and then he called Mr. Russo to see if they could stop by on the way back to borrow a few other things. “He’s got a few tools that I don’t.”

“It must have been a long time since you’ve done this sort of work,” she said, not for the first time.

He grinned. “It’s beginning to sound like you don’t trust me.”

She bit her lip. “I’m just saying there’s no shame in letting a professional—”

“Why don’t we make this a little more interesting?”

“What do you mean?”

He flipped a trowel end over end and caught it again. “
You’re
going to replace the tiles.”

“What?” Was he crazy?

“I’ll bet that I can take you through it step by step, and when we’re all finished, it will be so good that you won’t even be able to tell which ones were broken.”

She crossed her arms and gave him a skeptical look. “Not only do you think
you’re
all that, but you’re also willing to wager that you know enough to teach someone who’s never even used the tools before to complete this project that perfectly?”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

She raised a brow. “What are we wagering? And keep in mind, you’re already into me for half a house.”

He snorted. “How about an extra day? If you win and the job isn’t perfect, then I’ll credit you one agreed-upon evening free from our agreement without penalty, but if I win, then you give me one
extra
day.”

“And we each get to decide which day? If I want to cancel one evening in the next two weeks, any time, you won’t call foul?”

He nodded. “And the same goes if I win. I can claim you for an extra night of my own choosing, and you can’t say no.”

She didn’t even hesitate. Bria had never even used a screwdriver in her life. “All right, you’re on.”

…

Leo was covered in grout. The entire bathroom was covered in grout. Bria had it in her hair and across her cheek. There was still dust floating in the air from grinding out the original tile. It coated the fixtures, and when he looked in the mirror, it had turned his hair gray. Stray tendrils had come free of Bria’s cute little ponytail, and she was bent over the floor on hands and knees with a sponge washing the tiles, while he sat behind her and tried his best not to indulge his caveman fantasies as her ass taunted him.

One time he’d suggested that maybe she should slow down and let him do some of the more labor-intensive work, still worried that she might have lingering discomfort from her stay in the hospital. She’d given him such a dirty look that he’d backed right off, but when she had moved to lift the heavy box of tiles they’d found down in the basement, he’d intercepted and dared her to say anything about it. He behaved similarly when the bucket of grout needed to be opened.

She was trying, but Leo had never quite met anyone with such a complete and total lack of coordination as his haunting, beautiful, intellectually accomplished wife. It was something he hadn’t really known about her before, and her frustrated grunts and huffs as she struggled to chisel out the old mortar and painstakingly laid the new tile made him want to chuckle…but he valued his life, and so he’d kept it to himself.

The entire day had been a strange combination of new revelations and the familiar. He was used to working with Bria, but not like this. At the office, they’d had four years to fall into a routine. They’d each known what the other excelled at and divided the work accordingly. A hundred times this afternoon, he’d wanted to step in and take over, but that hadn’t been their deal.

“That’s good. I think we’re done,” he said now, swiping his hand over the new tile with a grin, but when he remembered that ultimately she’d been learning this skill in anticipation of the day he moved out of the house and left her alone for good, his smile faded. “Now we just let the grout dry, and tomorrow, we’ll sponge it down again.”

She looked doubtful. “It still looks cloudy. What if we wipe it a little more?”

“After it’s dried. Too much now, and you’ll wash the grout we just laid right out of the grooves.” He shuddered to think what she would do to this house if left to her own devices, but when it came to this particular project, he was still going to win.

“You did good,” he murmured. Even though the day had turned out much different from any Saturday they would have spent together before the miscarriage, he still felt like he’d gotten a little piece of his wife back today. “We could have hired someone to do this, but how fun would that have been?”

She glanced down at the floor and grinned. “I did do pretty awesome, didn’t I?”

His fingers grazed hers as he took the sponge away before she could get scrub-happy.

She glanced up, her breathing quickening ever so slightly. He noticed because he noticed everything about her. He couldn’t stop noticing, like her essence had been shot right into his bloodstream. Her cheeks flushed with the sudden awareness of him as well. She looked down at his hand on hers and didn’t jerk away. They were crowded into the en suite bathroom, kneeling together on the floor closer together than they’d willingly been in weeks, and Bria was smiling up at him.

“Bria,” he murmured, swiping his thumb across the gray smudge on her cheek and the line of her stubborn jaw.

She closed her eyes, and he slowly bent and pressed a whisper-soft kiss to her lips. When her mouth opened under his, he groaned silently but used every ounce of his control to hold back, drinking up her sighs like honeyed nectar and letting the both of them simply feel the kiss without pressing for more, until she leaned into him the littlest bit.